I survived a coma that went for almost two months. This has created a special interest for coma movies. I want to see what people think it is like. For me, it was a state of unconsciousness, a lot of very dark dreams, and years of recovery work (both drugs and physical/mental therapy). Usually a coma is just a storytelling device, a motivating event that happens and changes the lives of the characters around the person who has sunk into a coma.
It’s not common material for a top list but what are the best portrayals of comas in movies? They are Good Bye Lenin (2003) & The Big Sick (2017).
In Good Bye Lenin, a woman wakes up from a coma and her son protects her from reality: she is a communist supporter in East Berlin, who slept through it when the wall fell, so her son tries to keep up the guise of communism around them. It’s funny but I relate most to this one, as I went into a coma the day Donald Trump was elected and woke up deeply confused by an America that no longer made sense to me.
Like Good Bye Lenin, The Big Sick works as a tragicomedy. Kumail Nanjiani’s character, a Pakistani-American comedian, is dating a woman who, upon breaking up, goes into an induced coma. Now he’s got to meet the family and overcome the presumed prejudices that may have caused the breakup. Here, the coma is an active event in the movie that serves as a means for a reflection upon empathy and a relationship.
So, how’s Audrey do it? A spoiled daughter who terrorizes her family falls off a roof and goes into a coma and everyone’s lives around her get better for it. Her mother (Jackie van Beek) assumes her daughter’s identity and flourishes, her father (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) enjoys extra work as a director of Christian pornography, and her sister (Hannah Diviney) enjoys being the center of attention in the family.
It’s a darkly funny premise but the movie cannot find what would be situationally funny about these circumstances moment-by-moment. It has the specificity of an Australian centered comedy and is located and pitched in that way. But it’s hard to imagine where any joy would otherwise come from, as the movie is light on laughs.
What begins well goes off the rails until it no longer works. Jackie van Beek is a specific and probably acquired taste, but it’s hard to tell why from Audrey, a very regional comedy that’s all premise and low on delivery and laughs.